


Bleak Midwinter

by nessundorma345 (wastrelwoods)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Cellist!Clint, Clint POV, College AU, F/M, Hawkfrost - Freeform, M/M, Trigger Warning: see notes, first person POV, mute!Loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 06:46:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/nessundorma345
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I would tell you that I was hands-down the worst thing that had ever happened to Loki, but then I'd be competing with the accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleak Midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for triggers, please, because spoilers.

When I remember Loki, I think of snow.

He wasn't standing in a blizzard when we met. He wasn't crowned with a flurry of white when we parted. He hated snow. I...well, back then, I didn't really like it all that much either. I've developed sort of a soft spot, now.

I think of Loki because when snow falls it's fragile and beautiful and cold, like him. Because he came from a place far away where the snow never stopped falling, and his smile had frozen into a dagger of ice even as his eyes roiled with fire. Because his favorite movement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was Winter. I think of snow because when I knew Loki it always snowed like a fucking parade, flakes falling faster and thicker until it's all you could see. Mostly, though, it's because snow is so silent that it dampens every noise until all you can here is your own heartbeat. That was Loki. That was Loki all over. 

Probably, if he heard that, he would shake his head and tell me that metaphors are really not my area, Barton, and I would smile a smile brimming with sentiment, and his eyes would cloud. And the snow would keep falling. 

The thing you had to understand about Loki was his silence. That he never spoke a single word to me. The last word he ever spoke, some five years before, was the name of his little brother seconds before his car collided with a semi.

It was snowing then, but I didn't learn that until many years later.

As I said before, it wasn't snowing when we met. But it had snowed--not the night before, leaving the snow white and untouchable on the frozen ground; the snow was a week gone by, and it looked like mud and smelled like exhaust. The sky roiled like a storm at sea. 

It was two months and seventeen days into the Post-Natasha Phase. After Nat met Bruce and he crawled to her like a little lost puppy and all she could do was wrap him in her arms and fly him far away and never, ever let go. After she left me standing in the November rain with a bow in one hand and the fragments of my heart in the other. It's what she always said, Tasha, that loving someone like her meant nothing but a broken heart. She was like fire, and I got burned. And after that, it is really so surprising that I wanted nothing more than Loki's ice?

Even when I first saw him, he reminded me of snow. New snow. Untouchable. But you know me, I'm a risk-taker. So I reached out and touched him anyway, mostly to prove that I could. It wasn't my best decision, but then I'm not known for my good decisions,

His language was music, I learned that early on. That's not what drew me to him, but it's what kept me by his side after my fingers went numb from cold. Not too numb to play along, though. 

I'm good with a bow, you know? Maybe even the best, or at least I could pretend I was until I met Loki. I hated him for it, at first; hated rooming with Thor's freaky mute little brother, hated the absence of Natasha--my only real constant-- hated the first time I came home and found him plucking away at my cello with a faraway look in his icy eyes. Sitting on my bed, too, the smarmy little shit.

It was snowing that day. The snow melted by the next morning.

He played music like it was air and water and ice and pain; and I guess to him that's pretty much what it was. So I yell myself hoarse at him while he sits there like an iceberg with all his emotions submerged in the freezing water, and then he plays a discordant string of notes and flashes me his signature smile. 

There were stories told about that smile. Like that people on the receiving end of it died soon after. It was legendary. It was hateful in the extreme, made you want to curl up in a ball and scream. He flashed everyone that look at least once; he never smiled at Thor, though Tony got the smile upwards of fifty times, and that smile was my one hundred and thirty-sixth. I suffered no ill effects. I really had nothing more to lose, that winter after Nat left.

So maybe that's why I got him the violin. Not out of pity, because he would quite literally kill me in that case, and I would bleed frost. But out of something that a liar would call boredom and something much more like a need to understand. The look he gave me when he saw it for the first time was like the first snow of winter; the one that's pure and gentle and surprising. 

We sat for hours that summer in the cool of the basement; me with a cello between my knees and a bow balanced on a finger, he with a violin tucked under his chin as his bow danced across the strings.

That was the time I knew him best, fooled myself into thinking that I had found a way to breach the walls he built around himself and seen inside of his soul. Wanting to figure him out was a worthy goal, the best distraction I could ask for.

Of course, I learned later that no one, least of all Loki himself, had him figured out like that. So when I think of Loki, I don't think about the summer we spent in that basement composing our beautiful duet of lies. I don't think about the way our eyes would meet like the clear, cold winter's sky. Most of all, I never, ever think about sitting on the rooftoop of our dorm on the Fourth of July, and the moment that I saw him silouhetted by fireworks and fireflies and everything I thought made him him, and fell in love. Because Loki is like the snow, and the moment you think you know him is when the snowflake melts away to nothing in your palm. 

Funny, though, how the scars on his mouth and neck and the falsehoods in his eyes made his lips taste sweeter. Jesus, I think I'd better stop digging my nails into my palm now before I leave more scars. 

One more thing that's funny; I always assumed that when he smiled at me, it meant he hated me. And later, I thought it meant he loved me. I don't think I'll ever quite figure it out, but I think that that smile means something else entirely.   
   
That winter, though, that next winter, I figured it out. The smile meant "You don't know me", and that smile meant "goodbye".

When I remember Loki, that Loki of the winter, the one I thought was built on lies but was really unchanging at the same small, icy core of the Loki I loved, when I remember him I think of snow. Not gentle, new snow, the kind you use in snowball fights and piss your name on. No, this snow was the snow of scandinavian ice storms, with all the intensity of a glacier carving mountains in the fragile earth of me. This was the snow that gets you fucking banned from ever throwing a snowball again after you smack your friends in the face with an ice-studded monster and break their nose in three different places. He changed slowly, with the seasons, I guess, freezing slowly up until every time I said his name he'd turn and glare and his glacier eyes would carve right through my heart.

Oh, and that's the other thing. His eyes froze, too. They were bluer than the water deep beneath an ice-topped pond. 

We should have stopped with the first snowfall, our symphony of lies that did nothing but blind me to the bygones of summer. I was always so easily lied to, now I think about it. Natasha's "I'll always be here, Clint," and Loki's blizzard smile. I didn't care about the cold, I barely noticed it, I was so preoccupied with fucking him and being fucked (over) by him.

We never did stop. Not until I'd known Loki for a full year without actually knowing a thing about him that there was to know. None of what Thor knew, like how he'd asked his older brother to go pick up Balder one winter day and Thor had tossed him the car keys and ignored him. Like how he'd screamed himself hoarse at Loki when he woke up and their baby brother was dead, and Loki had picked up his medical chart and scribbled the words, "Your brother. Not mine," with a circle around his blood type. 

I didn't even know as much as fucking Tony Stark knew about him, like how one night of our summer he'd showed up at one of these huge, impersonal parties and hid in an upstairs bathroom with a bottle of scotch and Tony had snuck in after him with two glasses and held him while he sobbed; broken, strangled noises coming from his wrecked throat. 

So music was really my language, not his, and I was deaf to all others, I guess. 

When I remember Loki, I think about the last time I saw him, one of those sights that hooks into your mind and stays there. His hair was long and dark, and his face was pale and drawn. He had stood in the same spot by the window all morning, and the coffee held loosely in one hand had gone cold. I remember how the snow had started to fall, little cold flickers drifting down past the window. He turned to me, half-smile on his face, his eyes greener than I'd seen them in months, but so tired that it hurt to look at him. His fingers had rested gently over the doorknob, wating for something. Strength? All this time later and it's still just one more mystery to me. All I remember is wrapping his green scarf around his neck, and pulling him down into a gentle and not-really-that-chaste kiss.

He smiled at me as he walked out the door, and even I could tell that that smile said goodbye. 

They found his body the next morning, you know. Colder even than the coldest ice, all his blood drained out into the snow, the only color on him the ink of his hair, the green of his scarf, the two red lines drawn across his wrists.  He looked almost peaceful, the smile still on his face. God, I hated him in that moment, but I hated myself more. I still do. We were like twins in that moment, because he'd bled dry and I cried until my eyes were so sore they refused to let another tear fall. And I cried silently. 

Five silent years, he lived, haunted by his not-brother's death. Five unbelievably cold years. In the end I was nowhere near enough to warm him again.  

When I remember Loki, I think of snow. I think about the snows of our meeting and our parting. I think about the ice of his eyes and smile, the cold of his fingers looped through mine. He was like ice, cracks so tiny running through him that I never even saw them until he splintered apart. 

And I know, I know more than anything that he would hate how I remember him. Because come on, Barton, metaphors get old so easily. Especially ones about snow. And when he told me that, I'd laugh, and his smile would melt, the moment freezing into our memories like the world's first snowfall.

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: mentions of suicide, mentions of car accident, general PTSD and angst


End file.
